Ninan Cuyochi and the Inca succession crisis

Ninan Cuyochi was the elder son of the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac and, for a brief period in the early 1520s, the designated heir to the Inca throne. His death from smallpox in or about 1526 — before that of his father, who died of the same disease in 1527 — was the proximate cause of the succession crisis that produced the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa, the catastrophic weakening of the Inca Empire, and the success of the Spanish arrival in 1532. The disappearance of Ninan Cuyochi removed the clear and uncontested heir to the empire and left the succession to be fought out between two of his half-brothers, with consequences for the Andes that endured for centuries.

The principal sources for Ninan Cuyochi and the succession crisis are the chronicles of Pedro Cieza de León, Juan de Betanzos, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and Miguel Cabello de Balboa, all of them written in the second half of the sixteenth century. The chronicles differ in some details of the story, but they agree on the basic facts: that Ninan Cuyochi was declared heir by Huayna Capac; that he died of a disease that was almost certainly smallpox; and that his death left the succession open to the conflict that would end with the capture of Atahualpa by the Spanish at Cajamarca in 1532.

Ninan Cuyochi as Designated Heir

The Inca rules of succession did not follow a strict primogeniture. The Sapa Inca was chosen, in principle, from among the sons of the principal queen, but the actual choice was strongly influenced by the personal wishes of the reigning emperor, by the politics of the royal panacas, and by the strategic importance of the various candidates’ mothers. Huayna Capac had accumulated a very large number of wives and concubines during his long reign, and he had a correspondingly large number of sons. The chronicle accounts suggest that he had more than fifty sons by the time of his death, of whom a small number were serious candidates for the throne.

According to the principal chroniclers, Ninan Cuyochi’s mother was a princess of the Caranqui or a neighboring northern kingdom who had been taken by Huayna Capac during his northern campaigns (the chronicles give her different names, including Cura Ocllo and Mama Rahua Ocllo). Ninan Cuyochi was thus the elder half-brother of Atahualpa — both were sons of Caranqui princesses — and a younger half-brother of Huáscar, whose mother was a Cusco-born queen. The position of Ninan Cuyochi in the succession was ambiguous. By the European-style rules of primogeniture, Huáscar would have been the heir; by the rules of Inca court politics, in which the personal wishes of the reigning emperor were decisive, the choice could have fallen on Ninan Cuyochi, whom Huayna Capac is said to have favored.

Cieza de León and Sarmiento de Gamboa both record that Ninan Cuyochi was publicly designated as heir by Huayna Capac and was presented to the empire in a major ceremony at Tomebamba, the Inca administrative center in southern Ecuador, in the early 1520s. The chronicles also record that a great treasure of gold and silver was assembled in his name and entrusted to the priests of the Coricancha in Cusco. The official designation of Ninan Cuyochi should have ensured a peaceful succession, but the empire was about to be struck by a catastrophe of unprecedented scale.

The Smallpox Epidemic of the 1520s

In or about 1524 — the date is debated, but most scholars place the first wave in 1524 to 1526 — a wave of epidemic disease reached the Andes. The disease was almost certainly smallpox, brought by travelers who had been in contact with infected populations on the Caribbean coast and on the Pacific lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador. The disease, to which the Andean population had no inherited immunity, swept through the empire along the road system and through the networks of mit’a labor and state-sponsored festivals. The demographic impact was catastrophic: some populations lost 30 to 60 percent of their numbers in the first wave, and successive epidemics over the following century reduced the total Andean population by perhaps 80 percent.

The most serious consequence of the epidemic was the death of Ninan Cuyochi. According to the chronicles, he was traveling from Quito to Cusco in about 1526 when he fell ill and died. The chronicle of Miguel Cabello de Balboa records that the priests who accompanied him preserved his body for the journey south, and that the corpse was eventually taken to Cusco for interment. The loss of the designated heir threw the succession into disarray. Huayna Capac, who was himself in poor health and probably already infected with the same disease, was forced to choose between his remaining sons, and his failure to make a clear choice led directly to the war that followed his own death in 1527.

Huáscar and Atahualpa as Competing Candidates

With Ninan Cuyochi dead, the principal candidates for the succession were Huáscar and Atahualpa. Huáscar, the elder, had the support of the Cusco aristocracy and the royal panacas of the imperial capital; he was also the son of a Cusco-born queen and therefore had the strongest claim by the traditional rules of the Inca court. Atahualpa had the support of the northern military establishment and the peoples of Ecuador, and he had been raised in his father’s northern campaigns. He was also the brother of Ninan Cuyochi, and the chronicles record that some of the treasures assembled for Ninan Cuyochi’s accession were diverted to his cause.

The contest between Huáscar and Atahualpa was therefore a contest not only between two individuals but between two competing visions of the Inca state: the Cusco-centered traditional order, and the newer northern power base that Huayna Capac had built during his long reign. The conflict was also a contest between two regional aristocracies, and it is in this sense that it was a true civil war rather than a mere dynastic dispute. The death of Ninan Cuyochi removed the figure who might have been able to hold the two factions together; in his absence, the factions went to war.

The Outbreak of the War

The chronicle accounts suggest that the war might have been avoided if either Huáscar or Atahualpa had been willing to accept a subordinate position. Huáscar attempted to assert his authority by summoning Atahualpa to Cusco to acknowledge his elder brother as Sapa Inca; Atahualpa, advised by his generals, refused. The first armed incidents are recorded in the late 1520s, and the war escalated rapidly into a continent-wide conflict. The principal campaigns of the war are described in detail in the article on the war between Huáscar and Atahualpa. The role of Ninan Cuyochi in the war was that of the heir who had been lost, and the conflict between the two brothers is in part a struggle over the legitimacy that Ninan Cuyochi’s designation had conferred.

The Significance of the Succession Crisis

The succession crisis of 1526–1527 is one of the most important and least appreciated events in the history of the Americas. The Inca Empire of the early sixteenth century was a state that depended on the legitimacy of a single sacred ruler, the Sapa Inca, and the orderly transmission of the throne was the keystone of the entire political system. The death of the designated heir, and the failure to designate a clear successor, broke the system. The result was a war that destroyed the empire’s capacity to resist the Spanish, and a conquest that might otherwise have been far more difficult.

The succession crisis also had important long-term consequences. The destruction of the Cusco panacas and the dispersal of the royal mummies by the northern armies of Atahualpa broke the chain of legitimacy on which the Inca state was based. The Spanish, who arrived in 1532, were able to install their own puppet emperors because no uncontested candidate for the throne survived the war. The Neo-Inca State of Vilcabamba of the 1530s to 1570s was the last attempt to restore a legitimate Inca succession, and it was led by a brother of Huáscar and Atahualpa, Manco Inca, who had not been a direct participant in the civil war. The political troubles of the late Inca period, in other words, can all be traced back to the death of Ninan Cuyochi and the succession crisis that followed.